THE 36th Super Bowl, this year on Fox, is two weeks away. Not much time for Fox’s nationally celebrated and generously remunerated “A Team” to cease its habit-formed and unyielding dissemination of preposterous misinformation. But ya never know.

Sunday’s Packers-Rams telecast on Fox, start to finish, was bloated with nonsense starring in the role of expertise. What should’ve been rejected, beforehand – and out of hand – by Fox’s lead and veteran producer, Bob Stenner, was, as usual, presented as significant.

As the Rams’ Jeff Wilkins moved forward to kick the game off, Pat Summerall, no doubt armed with a stat handed to him by a numbers-simple researcher, said the following:

“One thing you might keep in mind is that the Packers have never lost a playoff game in a dome – never!”

That was the message left with a national-TV audience at kickoff of the NFC divisional championship.

You know how many playoff games the Packers had played in a dome? One. A ’93 wild-card game against the Lions.

You can make it two if you count the 1997 Super Bowl – Packers 35-21 over the Pats in New Orleans. Brett Favre that day threw for two touchdowns and a two-point conversion, no interceptions.

Yet, by the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game, Fox, spitting misinformation at break-neck speed, was telling us that Favre falls apart on artificial turf!

As the fourth quarter began, a graphic appeared that John Madden dutifully read aloud while blessing it as significant.

“You don’t like to bring these things up, but it’s a fact,” he said. “Brett Favre on grass has a winning percentage of 78.6 and a quarterback rating of 90.9. On artificial turf, his winning percentage is 30.4 and a quarterback rating of 78.7.”

A fact? Yeah, but it has almost nothing, if anything, to do with Favre playing on artificial turf. Fer crying out loud, Favre won a Super Bowl on artificial turf! And in that ’93 wild-card game vs. the Lions – on the carpet – he threw three TD passes, including one with :55 left to win the game!

Madden, more than most, should know that virtually all teams and all QBs have less success on the road, which is the only time the Packers play on artificial turf. Madden’s Raider teams, great as they were, still lost 11 more games on the road than at home.

But rather than debunk the bunk – or even ignoring it – Madden fully supported it as “a fact.”

So did Summerall, ignoring his own now-hear-this! statistical nonsense at the game’s start, thus contradicting nonsense with more nonsense.

The Packers, at this point, had a fourth-and-six, thus the moment that the aforementioned ridiculous graphic disappeared, it was replaced with another: “Packers 3/6 on fourth down, tied for ninth in the NFL.”

Naturally, fourth down comes mostly in two radically different forms – fourth-and-inches and fourth-and-desperate-from-anywhere. Yet, Fox, as do all of America’s football networks, see these plays as exactly the same. They’re lumped together, then thrown on the screen for viewers to consider as pertinent, applicable information.

Favre then threw incomplete. With the Packers now 3/7 on fourth down, where did that leave them? Tied for 16th, 18th, 23rd?

Minutes later, when the Rams had a third-and-12, Fox saw fit to show us that the Rams were 2-for-8 on third down this day. Gee, 25 percent would put them at or near the bottom of the NFL in that TV-cemented, one-size-fits-all statistical category. However, the Rams, at that moment, were winning, 38-10!

But TV always has encouraged the nation to look upon football as free-throw shooting instead of football. Sunday the Packers won every offensive statistical category that TV habitually deems as relevant – first downs, total yardage, time of possession, third-down conversions. And they lost, 45-17.

The telecast’s crowning moment came with 6:40 left, when Summerall stated that if not for a penalty that called a defensive TD back, Rams’ DB Aeneas Williams “would’ve had three touchdowns.”

“That’s right,” said Madden.

No, fellas, that’s not right, that’s ridiculous.

Williams’ called-back TD came after his first TD. Had it been allowed, the Rams would’ve kicked off and every ensuing play in that game would have changed. There’s no mortal way to know if Williams, nor anyone else, would’ve scored after that.

But this is how football, week after week, season after season, is presented to America – and by professionals, experts.

Is there not a network, at long last, that wants to be known as the network that actually understands the game of football?

Right now, they all do it pretty much the same. After all, no bad idea goes un-copied.